VMware First Steps: GSX Server and ESX Server

With this short article, we would like to conclude a series of publications devoted to the history of virtualization in the Enterprise segment of the market. Today we’ll talk about VMware, a company that today is the de facto legislator in the world of virtualization. Let’s take a look at what some of the earliest VMware products looked like: GSX and ESX.

VMware was founded in 1998. Its first commercially successful product is considered to be VMware Workstation, released in 1999 and designed to run on client hardware.

For server workloads, VMware GSX Server was developed from the ground up over the next 2 years. Its name is an abbreviation for the longer “working” name Ground Storm X. The first commercial version 1.0 dates back to 2001. It was installed on top of Windows Server or SUSE Linux, which characterizes it as a type 2 hypervisor.

An improved version of GSX Server 2.0 was released a year later, in the summer of 2002. Under its original name, the product existed until December 2005, when the last commercial version 3.2.1 was released.

The hypervisor has gained popularity due to a wide list of supported hardware (from a server to a regular desktop) and ease of installation and initial configuration. In addition, the GSX had built-in NAT and DHCP server, which greatly facilitated the process of network configuration.

GSX Server was then renamed VMware Server and distributed free of charge. 64-bit operating systems have also appeared in the list of supported guest systems, and the hypervisor is now able to allocate several vCPUs to machines. VMware Server was released on July 12, 2006 and was officially supported until 2011.

The sweet fruit of virtualization was loved by VMware engineers. Type 2 hypervisors are good, but type 1 can provide much more power!

In parallel with GSX Server, a new type 1 hypervisor was being developed. Unlike its predecessor, it could already be installed on bare server hardware without an intermediary OS.

The product was given the working name VMware Scalable Server. It is now known as ESXi. Below is a screenshot dated approximately 1999-2000.

Very soon, by 2000, the project received a new name: VMware Workgroup Server. And in March 2001, the company officially released VMware ESX 1.0 Server. ESX is an acronym for Elastic Sky X. It’s funny, but it was invented outside the walls of VMware. The employees of the company were well versed in computers, but they knew nothing about advertising and marketing. A specially hired agency offered a laconic Elastic Sky. The engineers rebelled: how is it, a new commercial product, in the name of which there is not the slightest technical flavor ?!

And they added a mysterious X at the end. Why? Probably, “so no one would guess!” It also sounds cooler. It’s funny how exactly this name hit the target: it is unlikely that back in 2001, someone came up with it with an eye on cloud computing.

Subsequently, a whole department was formed around the new product, the most famous employee of which was John Arrasjid, co-author and lead architect of the vCloud Architecture Toolkit (vCAT).

VMware ESX Server is the first Type 1 hypervisor on the market for Intel x86. It was the first to implement many features that have become almost standard: live migration of virtual machines, High Availability, automatic load balancer, power management tools, etc.

For several years, ESX and GSX were simultaneously available to a wide audience. GSX targeted a more mundane audience: small businesses, small government agencies, while ESX became the flagship product for the Enterprise sector. However, it wasn’t until 2006 that ESX really started being used.

Among other things, ESX had a service console. Its role was played by a Linux virtual machine, through which it was possible to manage the host and other VMs. To install additional third-party software (for example, backup services), it was supposed to use agent programs.

Even before ESX began its serious distribution in the business environment, development began on its successor, now without a service console. By September 2004, the company had a presentation of the first fully functional version of the product called VMvisor (VMware Hypervisor). In 3 years this product will appear on the market under the well-known name ESXi.

At VMworld 2007, the company unveiled VMware ESXi version 3.5. Previous versions of the program existed only in the depths of VMware and were not shown to the general public.

ESXi takes up much less space than ESX and can be installed in flash memory. In fact, it can already be considered as part of the server – this is hinted at by the letter i in its name. It stands for Integrated, integrated.

Until the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware offered customers two options: VMware ESX with a Linux console and ESXi with a server configuration menu. ESX support officially ended with the release of vSphere 5.

The software, like the hypervisor, has changed its name several times. For example, VMware VMcenter has been used so rarely and for a long time that nothing is actually googled about it. It is reasonable to assume that this is one of the “internal” product names. It appears, for example, in this screenshot:

The entire future path of VMware is well known to any user or system administrator who has at least once encountered virtualization. The company’s solution pool is large and varied, and promising developments such as Tanzu have recently begun to appear outside of test benches.